Response to “After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes In on Its Racist Past” by Richard M. Breaux

This article did an interesting job of tying race and gender together in relation to Disney films.  Breaux, who is critical of Disney’s depiction of race in The Princess and the Frog, does offer some valid examples of when Disney could have tried to be more historically accurate.  For one, the chances of Tiana opening a restaurant, let alone a fancy one, in New Orleans during the Jim Crow era are almost nonexistent.  There were also other smaller things, such as the fact that the street cars in  the film did not have a portable screen, even though those in New Orleans at the time would have in order to separate blacks and whites.  Small things like this definitely could have been included in the film.  However, I can understand why Disney did not want to address race in this film, considering the fact that it is a children’s film, and their feature films are meant to be entertaining more than historically accurate or informational.

One interesting argument I found in this article was the one made by Lillian Randolph, the voice of Mammy Two Shoes in Tom & Jerry, who realized that if stereotypical black roles were taken out of Hollywood, then many black actors and actresses would no longer have jobs. This puts black actors and actresses in a hard position, as they have to decide between keeping their cultural integrity and risking their career or accepting some demeaning roles in order to live a comfortable lifestyle.  This argument can also be made today for women who have to play seemingly sexist roles.

 Despite the shortcomings with this film, it really does seem as if Disney tried to make a film that would not seem offensive to the African American community, as this is the group of people that would end up purchasing the most merchandise related to the film.  I found it interesting that they met both with Oprah Winfrey and members of the NAACP in order to make sure the representations of black characters would not receive excessive criticism.  The goal of this film was to introduce a new black Disney princess for young black girls to identify with, but the real intentions of this film, like every other, were to do well both in the box office and with related film merchandise.  The relatively modest success of this film could be a testament to the fact that Disney has not yet figured out how to incorporate diversity into its films successfully.